Re: Fwd: Registration of 6 charsets

[Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com>]

Keld,

> 
> On Fri, Apr 07, 2000 at 05:55:52PM +0200, Antoine Leca wrote:
> > Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> > > 
> > > I regard Unicode as quite closed, as it costs about USD 12.000 a year to
> > > have a say (voting rights) in the Consortium.
> > 
> > ... and about EUR 600 for an individual to join (as a "specialist";
> 
> And then you have no vote over the standard. That is no membership.
> That kind of arrangement is actually forbidden if it was in Denmark.
> (No membership without voting rights).
> 

Please do not carry on about things that you apparently have no
knowledge about. The Unicode Consortium, by its bylaws, has a single
class of membership. Those "members" are the voting members of the
Consortium, and their voting rights are spelled out in the bylaws
explicitly, as they should be. Those voting rights constitute the
right to vote for the Board of Directors of the Consortium. And that
right is regularly exercised by the members at the annual meeting
of the members of the Consortium.

All other membership classes are creations of the Officers of the
Consortium (appointed by the Board of Directors), in order to broaden
participation in the Consortium's business (which by its bylaws is
the development and promotion of the Unicode Standard) to organizations
and people who cannot afford the $12,000 annual fee to be official,
de jure, full members of the Consortium. Those membership classes
were created to open the Consortium to that participation, and to bring
more experts and impacted organizations to the table to have a say in
the development, maintenance, and promotion of the standard.

Voting on technical issues regarding the Unicode Standard is the
province of the Unicode Technical Committee, which is run by a set
of rules developed by the Officers of the Consortium. Those technical
votes and decisions by the UTC are *distinct* from membership votes
run according to the bylaws. The technical business of the Consortium
is delegated to the Unicode Technical Committee, with the full approval
of the Board of Directors of the Unicode Consortium, who bear the
ultimate responsibility for how the Consortium conducts its business.

Your implication that the Unicode Consortium is running by procedures
that don't pass your sniff test for legality is particularly odious.
The Consortium is a registered non-profit corporation, operating in
accordance with the relevant laws in the State of California, with
bylaws fully reviewed by legal counsel, and with a Board of Directors
fully conversant in how corporations are run.

--Ken